Ideas for strategus Economy, Integration of Heirlooms and a use for gold

[Tristan]

Greetings.

Edit: Please check my next post in this thread. This post is somewhat outdated.

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tl;dr
I have a number of suggestions in the end of this post. How I came up with is explained and reasoned in the text below. I may have overseen something, I may have suggested what is already implemented and etc etc. But I is serious!

I must admit that when I read that there was no plans for gold besides "what ever you yourself as a player put into it" I started to panic.
An economy with a constant influx of money from "grinding" on pub-servers to be transfered into strategus would result in such extreme inflation that gold would have no use. In short, mercenaries would either be paid i commodities or expect the salary to be worth half of what they were paid the day after.

A lot of gold sinks come to mind i strategus: upkeep for soldiers (ticket) and upkeep for production costs.

But other ways are possible and could add interesting gameplay.

First a warning and a disclaimer. I play EVE and for all it is worth I like the game, but I have no intention of turning strategus into EVE.
However, strat can learn from EVE in the ways of making an interesting player based market.

Many things are the same in how I have heard the developers of cRPG are envisioning strategus. Players get base resources in villages (same as mining in eve) they use them to produce weapons and tools in cities (same as player producition in eve) and use those resources to wage war to gain more land (0.0 in eve or pew pew).

This could all work well without a currency, BUT it works so much better with a currency. In EVE we have isk in cRPG we have Gold.
Gold comes from an external source aka the "grind" on pub-servers. In eve this external source is bounties and mission rewards.

Eve has not experienced a huge inflation of the value of ISK because it is used for something and has a lot of money "sinks".
Those are insurances, brokers fees etc. etc. It is important that strategus has the same thing.

But when I then came to think of EVE production I started to think of t2 items. What does cRPG have, that could make manufactoring have a small edge. And I started to think of heirlooms.

My suggestions:

- A player who owns a certain heirloom can produce said heirloom in strategus for an increased cost of x% materials with an additional cost of x gold, where x is a good balance for this not to be overpowered.
- Add certain "rare" resource components that needs to be used in production of heirloomed items. Maybe it is only gained for every 50 units of its regular little brother.
- In order to extract and manufactor ressources and items you need to build the corresponding building for a cost of x resources and x gold.
- In order to extract resources you need players extracting from said city /village. Extracting resources cost x gold.
- Low tier items should be easy to access in all parts of the continents where as high tier equipment should be hard
- Make sure that each soldier (ticket) requires x gold in upkeep.
- Make sure that there is enough different resources and possibly in different tiers.

[22nd_King_Plazek]

Obviously I agree we need some money sinks.

But I do not know if requiring gold to perform these sorts of actions is ideal. These features you suggest ought require money, such as extracting resources are essential to the game. I do not want it to be mandatory to grind crpg gold to succeed in strategus. Even if it is just to get things "turning over" as it were.

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I would rather see something more along the lines of personal money sinks. For example buy a 5% XP bonus for 1 week for X gold, placing adverts on the crpg page to visit your town/ join your merc party/ faction etc for X gold for Y days. Allow a respec for X gold (massive X in this case) etc.

I think these sorts of money sinks are superior to the type that you suggest. This is because they will not negatively affect gameplay by necessitating money grinding in CRPG, while still having the same purpose of providing an outlet for the money.

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Of course even better would be to just not have crpg gold connected to strategus gold at all. Then this inevitable inflation hit making gold useless wont happen nearly as easily or predictably.

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The important thing to try and ensure whatever economy control measures are implemented is that in order to have a stable economy and to control the inflation you need to regulate the amount of money going into the economy and equalise it with the amount of money going out.

Unless of course you want Strategus to be a Weimar Republic simulation.

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[Tears of Destiny]

I have a half naked woman as my avatar

I would be interested in seeing this happen, especially if only special materials and places and character can do this, as you said.

[Meow]

boobies!

[Tennenoth]

Change tl;dr to da;dr (distracting avatar).

But some good ideas, personally I would love to see mass economy working but there does need to be a lot of work going into how money will enter continually as to give people a fair shot at getting money. I mean, you may wish to continue with the "wait in town" method that was used in the old version but I would really hate if it worked off how much you played in cRPG, that put me off to be honest.

Maybe some more ellaboration on your ideas of money sinks would be good.

[Tristan]

Plazek and Tennenoth have both pointed out flaws in my initial conception of the ideas.
As they both noted I thought of gold as essential to production, which would then require a grind of sorts on normal servers.

It is however obvious that grind,as it has been framed, is unwanted. That means you do not have to play regularly  to earn gold.
But we still have to define what we need gold for, in order for it to have any value as a currency. Especially when the game constantly generates more and more gold.

What we need to, then, is to define what abilities gold should have ie. what we need gold for in strategus and what requirements that put on the cRPG gold standard.

My idea is that:
- Gold should be able to work as a currency in strategus, where players can barter items and pay for mercenaries.
In order for this to work we need to counter inflation, which is currently added because of pub-grind.
- Gold should be able to pay for players equipment on regular servers.
No biggie, this is already what it is.
- Gold should be a currency with which players should be able to barter heirlooms on the heirloom market.
This is again already implented, but again risk inflation if gold is not removed from the system.

What is obvious is that:
1) We need ways to removed gold from cRPG
2) We do not want strategus to be reliant on grind and gold from cRPG.

Our only current money sink is upkeep, which is not nearly enough, and I doubt that player would want to work as mercenaries in strat just in order to buy more expensive eq in cRPG. And as a side note, more expensive equipment in cRPG is often not equal to better equipment.

So, after this wall of text I assume you can follow me when I say that:

We need a way for gold to be used in strategus, without it being a requirement nor majorily important for gameplay.
Yet it needs to hold a value large enough in order for players to accept it as payment.

My revised suggestion then continues to concern advanced item production:

- A player is able to produce heirloomed items if he: Owns the heirloom in question, pays x amount of gold for production, pays incease ressource costs and pays a special resource needed, only obtained in any rare way of several options possible (every 50th item etc. etc.).

This way gold would be essential in order to create heirloomed items and sell them, but not important for regular items.

Combined with upkeep we might be able to keep inflation to a min. but preferably another sink or two added.
Maybe just a minimum of gold required in order to own mercenaries (tickets) and for regular production.